Individual Differences in Emotion and Emotion
Regulation

Broadly speaking, my work here concerns how people
differ in the ways they experience, express, and regulate their
emotions and how these emotion processes affect their lives, including
consequences for affect (e.g., feeling good vs. bad), for relationships
and social bonds (e.g., closeness to others, relationship satisfaction),and for adjustment and psychological functioning
(e.g., depression, well-being).

(a) Emotion expressive behavior

In a series of earlier papers with James Gross, we
initially focused on emotion-expressive behavior. We showed that
individuals differ widely in their expressive behavior and that the
general domain of expressivity can be represented as a hierarchical
model. We also demonstrated the importance of these individual
differences (see BEQ) and the structural
differences among them for the individual's functioning. For example,
we found that although expressivity of positive emotions and
expressivity of negative emotions are positively related (i.e.,
individuals who express more positive emotions were also more likely to
express more negative emotions), these two components of expressivity
nonetheless had opposite consequences for individuals' social lives:
positive expressivity was linked to being better liked by others,
whereas negative expressivity was linked to being less well-liked.

(b) Emotion Regulation

Individuals differ in their use of emotion
regulation strategies such as reappraisal and suppression,
and these individual differences have implications for affect,
well-being, and social relationships. Are some forms of emotion
regulation healthier than others? We have focused on two commonly used
emotion regulation strategies: reappraisal (changing the
way one thinks about a potentially emotion-eliciting event) and suppression
(changing the way one responds behaviorally to an emotion- eliciting
event). Experimental findings demonstrate that reappraisal has a
healthier profile of short-term affective, cognitive, and social
consequences than suppression. Studies using individual-differences
measures find that using reappraisal to regulate emotions is associated
with healthier patterns of affect, social functioning, and well-being
than is using suppression.

James Gross and I developed a measure of
the habitual use of reappraisal and suppression, the Emotion Regulation
Questionnaire (ERQ). Using the ERQ, we
demonstrated that reappraisers experience and express greater positive
emotion and lesser negative emotion, whereas suppressors experience and
express lesser positive emotion, yet experience greater negative
emotion. Furthermore, using reappraisal as a regulation strategy is
associated with better interpersonal functioning and positive
well-being, whereas using suppression is associated with worse
interpersonal functioning and negative well-being.

Developmentally, we have shown that emotion
regulation undergoes important changes even after early
adulthood. We have found evidence for a normative shift toward an
increasingly healthy emotion regulation profile during adulthood:
individuals showed an increase in the use of reappraisal and a decrease
in the use of suppression from early adult (the 20s) to late middle
adulthood (the 60s).

We have further examined the extent to which
emotions and their regulation have direct effects on social
relationships in everyday life (Anderson, John, Keltner, & Kring,
2001). We tested the emotional convergence hypothesis; that is, the
idea that people in relationships become more
emotionally similar over time because this similarity helps coordinate
the thoughts and behaviors of the relationship partners, increases
their mutual understanding, and fosters their social cohesion. Using
laboratory procedures to induce and assess emotional response, we found
that dating partners and college roommates became more similar in their
emotional responses over the course of a year. Further, relationship
partners with less power made more of the change necessary for
convergence to occur. Consistent with the proposed benefits of
emotional similarity, relationships whose partners had become more
emotionally similar were more cohesive and less likely to dissolve.
These findings demonstrate that emotional processes and their
coordination across interaction partners are of central importance to
relationship formation, functioning, and long-term outcomes.

Tamir, M., John, O.P.,
Srivastava, S., & Gross, J.J. (2007). Implicit theories of emotion:
Affective and social outcomes across a major life transition.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 92, 731-744.